


I Will Finish What Was Started

by MechaMage



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post-Scratch
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-30
Updated: 2015-05-30
Packaged: 2018-04-02 02:30:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4042345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MechaMage/pseuds/MechaMage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Temporally-entangled quasi-guardians fight a losing war for a dead woman long after the Earth has lost any pretense of significance.</p>
<p>It doesn't dissuade them in the slightest.</p>
<p>(Expect violence and maybe some Rose/Dave down the line)</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Will Finish What Was Started

Jade English was a number of things to a number of people; a surprisingly common trend among those data points is “mother”. Certainly not in the conventional sense, no–that was not how reality had set up the scenario, and one struggles to argue that she turned out unhappy with the family that she forged for herself.

She had anticipated the child she would be charged with, and yet that designated duty was not her first; there are two before him. Twin misanthropes, old enough to have relinquished hope by the time she takes them as her own.

She brings them to her home and shows them purpose–“radicalised”, the papers will later say, in a time where less truth than ever remains in them, but the only difference there has ever been between freedom fighters and terrorists is whether or not you win.

The heroes of our story already know how it turns out–none of them ever expect to win.

—

Her children-come-protégés are fifteen when she first shows them the clouds.

Prospitians are by no means dumb, nor observant, but despite being aliens by all intents and purposes they don't really seem to mind at all when they see a human, especially if they happen to be wearing appropriately-coloured garb. It is because of their benevolent nature that it is easy to skulk around in those golden streets while the bulk of the populace sleeps, and climb high up on the towers of the dreaming to see what Skaia decides must be shown. Jade has known of them all of her life, and her frequent visits have taught her much of the path she will follow.

Rose and Dave are summoned by her late in the afternoon, as the falling sun paints the sky in warm watercolours. A set of clothes has been prepared for each of them- golden tunics of unusual construction and, at that time, unknown purpose. “I’ve got errands to run, if you want to think of it like that. You should come along! It’ll make it a lot easier to explain why we really do all of this, which I promise I’ll get around to some day.” Jade is starting to get old (though she refuses to let her inner child die for it) and in her still-youthful eyes shines profound wisdom; her vast experience perhaps augmented via exploitation of predestiny and oracular knowledge.

To say that they accept understates the haste with which they dress into the peculiar uniforms, and then she leads them out of the house, breaking into a run across the open fields of the island they dwell upon–whatever the voyage might hold, keeping up with their elder was a good warm up. The destination quickly becomes clear as the ruins that lie out in the small cove draw closer. Needless to say, that escalates the mystery; neither of them had been permitted to enter it. They have long since known this, and the last time either of them tried a couple of tightly-grouped warning shots had been sufficient to dissuade their interest.

There’s a crude rope bridge out to the mouth of it that creaks under their weight but ultimately holds fast, Jade briefing them as they follow. Rose sticks close by, eager to sate her interest, while her brother hangs a little back, trying to seem tastefully and coolly disinterested but looking a little lost without any pockets to put his hands in.

“The people are...well, they’re nice! But they don’t seem to really notice that I’m not supposed to be there? I have a couple guesses why, though those,” She taps the tip of her nose with a conspiratorial wink, “remain with me. I trust you and all!, you just probably wouldn’t understand! Of course, I think today will probably make you think I’m a tiny bit less crazy–I’ll be damned if it doesn’t.”

The elevator in the centre of the chamber (which is otherwise not so noteworthy, and both of them had gotten a good peek in past adventures anyway) moves for a long time before it stops–definitely somewhere underground, and yet the air is as fresh as that outside. Apparently, once one has solved the engineering problem of a temple that can survive re-entry and deep impact, and millions of years of entropy, it’s a pretty trivial task to install air con. None of the current occupants of it are quite aware of the nature of it, but they’d surely be thankful to Paradox Space for seeding such an accommodating facility if they did.

Jade ignores the rest of the constructs at the bottom, and prompts them to do the same as she unfurls a rope ladder that has been firmly nailed into the stone–a glance down reveals why it’s necessary, as the sides of the pit it descends into are of a fierce gradient. Not too bad on the way down, as she proves by sliding down it with a few stumbles and an almost childlike glee, her adopted charges following rather than lose her in this strangely-expansive structure.

Out of the two transportalisers down there (too familiar from the house to be unusual to the kids, even if they do sorta defy conventional science), only the golden-yellow one gets any attention today. “Now, I know things are gonna be weird, but whatever you do, don’t freak out. Don’t ask how I know, but you’re kinda guaranteed to survive further than this! Actually, scratch that, you’re about to know, a little curiosity is to be expected.” Though she wore a dress, one would be a fool to assume that impaired her in any way–she deftly shoves a distracted Rose through with the sole of her boot, and her encouraging/terrifying grin manages to get Dave in ahead of her.

The typical tingle of travel violating the cosmic speed limit and, for Rose, the rough, telekinetic shunt of the automatic safety mechanism that stops her getting telefragged by her brother, are a comforting reminder that the technology is nothing they haven’t seen before. And boy, do they need the comfort, standing there gawking up at the golden skyline, unlike nothing on this Earth or even this universe. The natural conclusion would be that it isn’t, and at this point that is hardly even a particularly presumptuous logical leap. After accepting that your weird, adoptive mother (who is worryingly good at acquiring weapons-grade enriched uranium) has weird teleporter technology that would make the Federation blush, is it really much further to assume she can make them stretch beyond her home planet?

Rose certainly doesn't seem to think so, by any stretch of the imagination. "I suppose it's safe to say we're not in Kansas anymore?" She mutters, looking up past the tops of buildings into the void, and managing to catch a glimpse of the supermassive (or just terrifyingly close) blue pearl of a sun hanging in the sky. "Can I at least have reassurance that we're in the same galaxy? Or at least the Virgo supercluster? I mean...how far could we have possibly come? Is there any lim-" A chortle from Ms. English dissuades her from continuing.

"Dear me, someone's been reading my astronomy books, have they? No, dear, don't be so melodramatic, we haven't come that far at all!" She rubs Rose's shoulder with a friendly, encouraging smile–she knows enough about her by now to make sure she understands that there is no malice between them. "Owned." mutters the quiet Strider. Jade punches him in the shoulder and her daughter goes from pouting to a slight smile. "Right, well, where exactly are we?"

"Well, it's very difficult to chart the space we exist in right now, but it's safe to say we're somewhere outside the universe!" Both of them give her the blankest stares, and even with confidence like hers she starts to walk along again, eager to show them something that might prove them wrong.

The streets are quiet at this time of...well, it's difficult to quite define a time, because, despite orbiting, even the dark side of the satellite is blanketed in the warm glow of the body it swings around. Still, there are very definitely a lot less people than there might have been, as they wander down wide avenues with just a few beings on them. The beings in question appear, at first glance, mechanical androids constructed with a shell of some white ceramic, or maybe a polymer, but close inspection as they pass (and wave politely) shows them to be definitively organic, and despite their alien appearance they move in ways that are comfortingly human.

Two towers shoot up out of the skyline high into the vast void above, and one of them is apparently their destination. It shares an uncanny resemblance to the tower that they sleep in, something that goes noticed but unmentioned–there will be time for interrogations when they are less awestruck by their surroundings. Sense of adventure keeps them from speaking up. It is as though they are walking through some timeless dreamscape, and in the moment they acknowledge it for a dream they will be shunted back into their waking bodies.

Fortunately, the conspicuously-familiar tower shares the same transportaliser-based transit technology, whisking them swiftly up to the highest room. It is a child's bedroom, and the child lies before them–a young girl announces her presence by rolling over in her sleep, garbed in the same golden clothes that their adventuring party wears. "Beautiful, isn't she? She is to be the descendant of my brother, though I worry that our mother may not allow him to live as long as to see her. I think he sort of knows that too." Jade frowns, but her tone is starkly and possibly artificially matter-of-fact. The resemblance between the two is clear, accentuated by the near-identical buck teeth. In her sleep, she looks troubled by something, her facial features hinting at distress or pain.

Jade turns away as she continues to speak, walking away to look out the window in the wall. "She isn't born yet in our universe. This is...sort of a projection of her? Think of it as a separate body, in a separate universe, but sharing her mind. Does that make sense?" Looking back over her shoulder, she sees Rose running her hands along the wall, as if testing the texture of this dream-world; behind her, Dave delicately puts his fingers to her cheek, feeling the warmth of life under her skin. "I don't think sleeping girls can consent, brother." Rose chuckles, and he pulls his hand back like her flesh was hot as a frying pan.

"Kids, don't squabble, the show is about to start." Each emits murmured snark as they come over to where she sits on the windowsill–the rotation of Prospit swings the towers Skaiabound, and as they approach the blue mass they can see the clouds that swirl on the surface rush up to meet them. A long, tense moment of silence stretches out as they sink towards them, and as the towers reach their lowest point it becomes clear that the clouds are far from normal. Images twinkle in them, images of times gone by and times to come and happenings from universes far away yet causally linked. Jade urges Dave to remove his shades, and in his awe he complies; the three of them gaze into the clouds, and they see.

They see two humanoid bulks rise out of a burning, roiling mass of green flames, and feel the strangest connection, a connection that becomes clear when they raise their heads; they look upon themselves, younger and different but ultimately the same, the same rounded shades and the same wispy blonde hair and the same Byzantine eyes. It is not quite that they understand exactly how it could be, but the vision ekes veracity, the images seeming impossibly real.

They sit and watch for what feels like the longest time, seeing many things and only understanding some of them, but despite every fragment of time being careful crafted to impart only exactly what they need to know, the pieces all fit together–not into a neat picture, but into a hashed-together collage that tells the story in a far more colourful format.

The return journey is somber. Jade tells what she knows of Prospit, tries to begin a lecture on dream mechanics and temporal interplay between home and here, but when her pupils seem to engrossed in their own thoughts she decides to leave it for later. She has known them so long that her first visit seems so long ago, but she still remembers the impact it had. She brought two children up to see the clouds, yet they come down from it wiser and imperceptibly older in manner, if not in body.

Decades later, one of the trio is dead, but in memory she lives on. Her children, her friends, they recount the time she showed them purpose over a glass of some inordinately expensive liquor—bought for status, now drank without appreciation for taste to dull pain physical and otherwise. Rose is the better storyteller amongst them, and she takes up the duty of telling this one, if only to allow Dave to focus as he tends to the ragged lacerations cut into her by thrown shrapnel. The mantle, a private war, has been passed down to the successors. Tonight, they drink to her as a martyr, a hero, and a mother.


End file.
